Category Archives: politics

The Addiction of Government Handouts

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It’s not the handout recipients who are addicted that are the problem, although their addiction is tragic in its own right. It’s the government men and women who are addicted to giving handouts who are the problem. The former are individual problems, even though those problems aggregate. Government men and women, though, are inflicting their nation-level addiction on the nations over which they reign, and their addiction is a national security threat approaching existential as they render their nations helpless against aggressor nations. That is immoral enough, as those government betray the same people they’re charged with protecting.

The immorality extends, though, when it comes to Europe’s NATO member nations. European NATO governments provide canonical examples of both immoralities.

When the Cold War ended, European governments slashed their military budgets and spent a windfall of several trillion dollars on social programs—a popular policy with voters when Europe faced few external threats and enjoyed the security protection of the US.
Now, European nations are finding it difficult to give up those peacetime benefits, even as the war in Ukraine has revived Cold War-era tensions and the US tries to shift its focus to China. Most are failing to get their armies in fighting shape.

The German army, in particular has been shrunk to a paltry 180,000 men and women, a large fraction of whom are in non-combat jobs, and not even combat-supporting jobs at that. The German army has only a couple hundred tanks, a large fraction of which are not operational. The army, by Government politician conscious decision, is not capable of defending itself, even as it trickles out arms to Ukraine. The decision to not defend gets worse [emphasis added].

During negotiations for Germany’s 2025 budget earlier this year, Finance Minister Christian Lindner wanted to free up money for defense by freezing social spending for three years—letting it lag inflation. The move was rebuffed by other parties in the governing coalition…. Spending on military aid for Ukraine was cut to €4 billion, about half this year’s level.
What the coalition parties did agree on was a €108-a-year increase over two years in Kindergeld—an annual €3,000 payment per child to all families, regardless of income. Today, that benefit alone, payable for offspring up to age 25, costs more than €50 billion a year, as much as Berlin’s annual Defense Ministry budget.

Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck articulated very clearly the addiction and its immorality, although he didn’t recognize it.

The idea—we are dismantling the welfare state because we need more money for the military—I would find fatal.
Social spending is necessary to keep the country together.

Leave aside the foolishness of that claimed threat of dissolution from any lack of socialism. Even such a one as Habeck can recognize that an intact nation that has been conquered and occupied through its government’s refusal to defend that nation has been functionally dissolved.

The lesson: it was easy to swap guns for butter; reversing the trend is far more challenging.

Any rational person—even a government politician—knows it’s far easier to get addicted than it is to break the addiction.

Nor is Germany alone in these immoralities. Here are just a few of the one-third of NATO members whose government men have chosen not to enable their nations to defend themselves or to come to the aid of their fellow members.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has refused to put a date on [any increase in defense spending relative to GDP]. Military spending in Italy and Spain, meanwhile, sits under 1.5%.

The immoralities and the betrayals are done deliberately, as these men and women refuse even to try to curb, much less to control, their addiction.

The immorality extends one more time: those government men still refuse to prepare their governments and to enable their defense establishments to defend the nations over which they rule, and with that failure, they betray their fellow NATO members by rendering themselves incapable of aiding their fellows against an invasion. Instead, they create their nations as dependent on the treasure, and especially the blood, of their fellows should they be the target of attack.

These conscious and continuing moral betrayals by NATO member nations render NATO a waste of American money, and blood.

That’s the price of addiction—it even prevents those responsible for it from resisting it.

At What Cost?

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The headline and subheadline say it all:

Ignore the Defeatists. America’s Strategy Is Working in Ukraine.
Kyiv remains far from victory, but the US is achieving its primary goal: containing the spread of Russian power

The strategy of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Number Two, Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, vis-à-vis Ukraine, far from working, is an utter failure and wholly immoral. This so-called strategy is not one of helping Ukraine win its fight for survival against Russia’s barbaric invasion; rather, it’s one of keeping Ukraine from losing its fight.

The news writer’s lede:

As summer turns to fall, the news from Ukraine has been harrowing. Across the country, Russia has been attacking civilian targets, destroying residential buildings, schools, and hospitals. Russia has been steadily degrading Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, ensuring that Ukrainians have a very hard winter ahead of them. In the next few months, fresh waves of Ukrainian refugees could well be pouring into Europe.

By slow-walking delivery of most of the weapons Ukraine needs at the rate at which it needs them, by limiting the targets against which Ukraine is permitted to use our…largesse…and by withholding outright many other of the weapons Ukraine needs, all the Biden-Harris administration is doing is keeping the AFU in the field steadily bleeding, soldiers being maimed or killed outright, Ukrainian civilians, women, and children being explicitly targeted by the barbarian—and keeping the barbarian’s war continuing.

On top of that, this slow-walk and withhold only runs up our own costs in dollars and equipment, and that is leading to increasing disgruntlement among Congressional politicians with their concerns about what we’re actually getting for our money and equipment, and their concerns about whether we should continue those costs—even at the expense of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and to survive the barbarian’s invasion.

Containing the spread of Russian power? I wonder what impact on Russian power an outright Ukrainian victory would have.

Wrong Response

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As usual. And as usual, the wrongness of the response is due to mischaracterizing the problem.

The Treasury Department on Thursday released 603 pages of proposed rules for the corporate alternative minimum tax, or CAMT, reaching a milestone in this exceptionally complex endeavor for regulators and corporate tax executives. The proposal comes more than two years after Congress passed the law creating the tax and more than 20 months after it took effect.

The rationalization is offered by the Biden-Harris’ Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo:

This is about tax fairness. The ability to use accountants and lawyers to reduce tax bills down to zero gives billion-dollar corporations a competitive advantage over smaller businesses.

They don’t understand what’s fair. Here’s what’s fair: make the problem irrelevant by simplifying the corporate tax code, rather than complexifying it, by reducing the corporate tax rate to that paid by those ill-treated small businesses. Even fairer, and not just for businesses, would be to reduce the corporate tax rate to zero for all businesses. That way, large corporations, with their accountants and lawyers, won’t have any “unfair” advantage over smaller businesses.

And there’d be no need to write 603 pages of regulation to implement a simple-sounding and wrong-headed tax rule. Which would reduce the need for all those Treasury bureaucrats whose jobs center on writing arcane, excessively complex regulations.

Another Reason to Shift

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Boeing and union leaders reached a tentative labor deal that includes:

  • 25% pay increase over four years
  • bolster retirement benefits
  • lower healthcare costs
  • commit Boeing to building its next plane in the unionized Pacific Northwest

The rank-and-file object. They want a 40% pay increase over four years, and they’ve characterized it as a hard line. They’re also still upset that Boeing dared set up an aircraft production plant in the non-union south. They voted Thursday to reject the contract and then to strike beginning that night at midnight.

The strike will halt most of Boeing’s aircraft production, and that would occur

at a time the aerospace giant is bleeding cash and piling up debt….
A prolonged work stoppage could further strain the industry’s supply chain and exacerbate jet shortages for airlines struggling to meet resurgent travel demand.

A strike—telling company management that if the union doesn’t get its way, it’ll destroy the company by preventing it from operating at all—is nothing more than legalized extortion.

This is one more reason to move even more aircraft production to right-to-work States.

With unions having monopoly power over business labor, and this Boeing branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union (among so many other unions) so blatantly abusing its monopoly power, this also is one more reason to rescind the special status of unions as being exempt from antitrust laws.

Realistic War Aims

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The first two paragraphs lay out the case, erroneous as it is.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s leaders have insisted that Russia needs to be driven out of all Ukrainian territory before any peace talks could begin.
Now, with Russia continuing to make slow gains on the battlefield and Western support for Ukraine showing signs of fatigue, Ukraine may need to come up with a more realistic plan, at least for the next year of the war, according to European diplomats.

The first mistake is the claim that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This is false, as even the authors of this missive must know: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and occupied Crimea and two of Ukraine’s major eastern oblasts.

Leave that aside, though. The larger and more serious mistake is that Ukraine needs a more realistic plan than the one it plainly stated when Russia began the second phase of its invasion in 2022. That plan is the ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine as a precondition to peace talks.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy will travel to Ukraine on Wednesday to meet with Ukrainian officials in part to discuss how best to define a Ukrainian victory and what aid it will need to achieve that, according to officials.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already defined what a Ukrainian victory would be—see above. The problems that make achieving it difficult for Ukraine are Western—and mostly caused by the Biden-Harris administration, in particular. Start with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s tacit permission to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the Russian buildup in Belorussia in early 2022—Biden said that a small invasion incursion would be OK (It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…). Continue with Biden’s offer to Zelenskyy, after Putin’s barbarians went in and tried to capture Kyiv on the fly, of transport out of the country, to which he responded I don’t need a ride…. I need more ammunition, therewith demonstrating far more courage and understanding of the situation than Biden and his team.

Continue to where we are now: Biden and the rest of the West, while bleating about unshakable support for Ukraine, do not insist that Ukraine win, only that it not lose. Worse, in keeping with that timidity and immoral support for only keeping Ukraine in the fight bleeding and dying, Biden and Europe are still(!) slow walking the arms and ammunition and logistics that Ukraine needs at the rate Ukraine needs them in order to fight to win. Biden even is telling Ukraine that US weapons may not be used against targets inside Russia except those just across the border and then only to break up an attack in progress.

With Biden preserving Russia as a sanctuary nation (and the left worries about Donald Trump “collaborating with” Russia), it’s the Biden-Harris administration that needs to better identify its role in Ukraine’s efforts to achieve victory.